Travel to Break Out of Ideological Niche

It is not my impression that the act of world travel, in and of itself, broadens the mind. Rather, people who go abroad just tend to view the various places they visit through the same paradigm of the place they come from –they see what they expect to see through the lens of their own culture, through the looking glass of their own tribe. In this context, everything that runs contrary to these preset world views are either filtered out and blocked or twisted to fit neatly into the assemblage of opinion that is already taken to be fact.

If you think the world is poor and impoverished, you will find poor people everywhere. If you think that the world is fine and well fed, you will find this too. If you go abroad as a bleeding heart liberal you will tend to gain information, experience, and observations to build up this political stance. If you set out a staunch conservative, then there is much in the patterns of the world that will fit neatly into your arguments.

I do this too, I am ignorantly human.

Travel does not make people more worldly, it just adds more fodder experience and observation to their preset ignorances. Travel often has the weird effect of being able to show what each individual traveler expects to see. In this way, I do not believe that many people learn much of anything new just from traveling the world. They just seem to reinforce their own paradigms over and over again. I do not believe that visiting new places in the world changes the mind, rather, it just makes the skull ever thicker.

But I do know that the act of long term travel will eventually ease the clamps that keep these paradigms in place. I do not believe that this comes from exposure to the new, but, rather, from lack of exposure to the old.

I am not a different person now because I’ve traveled through 50 or so countries for over a decade. I am a different person now because I spent all of this time outside of my own culture, outside of my tribe, outside of the barrage of information that keeps my mind in its ideological place without replacing it with any other consistent line of information. I extended the distance between myself and my tribe, and the power that it held over my opinions wanned. This distance from the influences of your own culture is often enough to allow your mind to expand beyond the narrow confines of your tribe. Change in perspective only comes when the traveler is gone so long that they grow out of the cultural husk they started out wearing. The traveler does not grow into a new culture — going native is a pompous fantasy — but they often develop new approaches to life from not being force fed any singular world view.

Long term, multi regional travel often provides the elbow room to develop a particular brand of idealogical free radicalism. You are not hemmed into any one value set, any one political position, or any singular social tier. You are a social free radical, and can mingle with the high and the low of society — you are outside the lines of whatever pack you move through and are alloted a sort of freedom of thought and opinion.

Like many travelers, I have found myself comfortable with being the ‘other,’ it is only when I’m taken to be “one of us” that I find myself clawing for a social escape route. People say that travel is an addiction because of the thrill, the constant stimulation, of the practice, and this very well may be so, but for me, I know that the social free radicalism inherent to the travel is one of the prime factors that keep me on the road.

This social elbow room becomes very easy to get use to, and only presents a problem when in a situation where the social walls are hemmed in and you are expected to march in step, obstruct the path, or get out of the way.

Travel to break out of ideological niche, to face fact head on

The danger of disagreeing in a tribe

People tend to confirm their expectations. It is far easier to build up what you already believe to be true than to re-stratify an entire point of view. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless another force acts upon it.

Being the force that acts against the motion of previously uncontested opinion is often dangerous — doing so means challenging someone’s view of the world, it means challenging them personally. I have often seen the fire in a liberal’s eyes when I mention that many NGOs are hoaxes; I am sometimes lashed out against for simply sharing my opinion that the bulk of the “developing” world does not need to be saved; it is easy to be verbally attacked for making statements that runs directly contrary to what a particular tribe of people have built up to be undeniably fact from within the walls of that tribe.

I pick on the save the world sect here, but the same goes for just about any group of people who operate in a social information vacuum — a group, a club, a community, a tribe. Whether this means the rich conservatives of the USA, liberal activists, various religious sects, or the jungle people of Peru it is all the same: challenging people’s world view — their expectations of what they believe the world is like– is dangerous business.

[adsense]There are many opinions thrown around the world, and where those opinions are contested they are safe to discuss. But in places where an opinion is wrapped up as a communally confirmed fact, disagreement alone is enough to put you on the chopping block — kicked out, your sociability withdrawn. For a conservative and a liberal to go head to head in a public debate is one thing, but for a Republican to enter a liberal’s home and start talking about the great deeds of George W. Bush is to insult. In the second case, entry into a tribe — a perceived ideological safe zone — has been commenced, a contrary point of view raised, and the harmony of perceived fact disrupted.

The pluralist community is a myth, people rarely recreationally associate with anyone who is not their ideological compliment.

Any traveler quickly learns that when inside the walls of a community confirmed opinion, you keep your ideas to yourself. Nod your head politely, act aloof, but disagreeing only leads to problems. Individuals can be disagreed with but communities cannot.

It is funny how the human animal tends to lose intelligence in exact proportion to how many people of their group are in proximity to them. Individual intelligence is always trumped by group idiocy. The tribe renders the individual stupid, or, more precisely, the individual must dummy themselves down to ideologically fit within the bounds of their tribe. Take a person and stick them out of their element, have the same conversation, and you are prone to speaking with a much smarter person — or at least someone who is more open to hearing other opinions. Take this person in the context of their group and any semblance of ideological pliability often dissipates.

When I am faced with group opinion that I really do not agree with, I realize that I have three courses of action:

2. Directly disagree and challenge their world view, providing the necessary conflict which strong opinions often crave.

3. Act politely aloof.

The first option means shape shifting — something that I cannot pull off very well. The second second often means challenging the world view of a group — which is dangerous. While the third option is truly a lemminglike maneuver.

Which option I choose depends on circumstance.

Conclusion

To believe any position on this planet is to be an ignorant fool. For believing in one angle of truth is at the expense of all others. It feels good to stake a sharp opinion, it feels good to be hard line. Humans are naturally aggressive animals, and inter-group conflict feeds our R-complexes like nothing else. Ignorance is natural.

Perhaps travel does not really lead to a free radical world view based upon experiencing other culture, observing other ways of life, or having additional exposure to contrary facts and figures, but because there is a distinct lack of consistent social pressure to reaffirm any single angle on the world. This does not mean that travelers are passionless blank slates, open minded shape shifters — to the contrary, the long term travelers that I have meet tend to be fiercely opinionated. But their opinions often fall off to the wayside of any established tribe, group, or sect: they become lone wolves, singular entities of a pack animal — social free radicals.

The traveler moves through a world of absolute truth. Each group, each culture, each social sub-sector of the planet claims that they have the one and only supply of this commodity. Truth, as in world-views and iron wrought opinion, is everywhere. The blinders of culture cannot be removed from exposure to the new but from a lack of exposure to the old. Removing yourself from the deluge of opinion that you automatically take to be fact is what allows you to break out of an ideological niche. Travel does not inherently make anyone wiser — but getting away from the constraining forces of your tribe may.

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Wade Shepard is the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. He has been traveling the world since 1999, through 76 countries. He is the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China, and contributes to Forbes, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. Wade Shepard has written 3053 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.

About

Wade Shepard is a traveling writer who has been traveling the world since 1999, through 76 countries. He is the author of Ghost Cities of China, a contributor to Forbes, Citiscope, The Diplomat, and many other publications. This is his personal blog where he collects the stories, anecdotes, and observations from his travels that don’t fit in anywhere else.

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